Quirks of Memory
Alcohol and Memory (non-blackout)
Alcohol myopia, lessened sensory awareness, reduced encoding and increased suggestibility.
Childhood Amnesic Barrier
The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
Confidence and Accuracy
Confidence in a memory has little relationship to accuracy.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.
Consistency Bias
The commonly held idea that we are more consistent in our attitudes, opinions, and beliefs than we actually are.
Context Effects
Cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
Cross-Race Effects
The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own.
Crytomnesia
A form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
Egocentric Bias
Recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one’s exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was.
External Sources of Memory Distortion
External factors that can distort memory encoding and recall.
Fading Affect Bias (FAB)
Negative emotional memories tend to fade more quickly.
False Memory
Research on false memories.
Flashbulb Memories
Memory for dramatic events.
Gender Differences for Memory
Differences between men and women’s memory.
Gist Memory
Examining encoding and reconstruction of the primary aspects of an event.
Hindsight Bias
The inclination to see past events as being predictable; also called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect.
Illusion-of-Truth Effect
People are more likely to identify statements they have previously heard as true (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
Imagination Inflation
Merely imagining a criminal event can create a believed-in false memory.
Improving Eyewitness Memory
Research findings on improving eyewitness recall.
Inhibition of Memory
Memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information.
Intoxication and Memory
The impact of alcohol and other recreational drugs on memory formation.
Isolation Effect
The isolation effect predicts that an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” (called distinctive encoding) is more likely to be remembered than other items.
Leveling and Sharpening
Sharpening is usually the way in which we remember small details in the retelling of stories we have experienced ourselves or are retelling those stories. Leveling is when we keep out parts of stories and try to tone those stories down so that some parts are excluded.
Levels of Processing
The levels-of-processing effect describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing.
Misattribution of Memory
Misattribution of Memory involves source details retained in memory but erroneously attributing a recollection or idea to the wrong source.
Misattribution of Memory
Also called “Source Monitoring Error”.
Misinformation Effect
The misinformation effect happens when a person’s recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of post-event information.
Mood Congruent Memory Bias
There is improved recall of information when the event is congruent with one’s current mood.
Peak-End Effect
People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
Persistence
Persistence is intrusive, unwelcome, recall, such as occurs in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Recovered Memory
Exploring the Recovered Memory debate.
Remembering changes Memory
The act of remembering an event is reconstructive and actually changes the original memory.
Reminiscence Bump
The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.
Rosy Retrospection
A person later rates past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.
Schema / Script Memory
Schemata is a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information.